Alexander C. Irvine

by A Scattering of Jades

  Again, too many variables, too many unanswerable questions. And he hadn’t even stopped to wonder about the whereabouts of Tamanend’s mask, which John Diamond must have absconded with. Or been killed attempting to acquire.

  God damn all dead men, Steen thought. Prescott and Diamond and Burr and all the rest.

  A sharp knock on the study door interrupted Steen’s train of thought. “Come in,” he called irritably, sranding to greet the visitor.

  Police Lieutenant Ambrose Winkler entered and shut the door. “Afternoon, Steen,” he said.

  “To what do I owe this pleasure, Lieutenant?” Steen asked, returning the Historia to its place on the shelf. He gestured at the lapel of Winkler’s coat, where a silver star was usually prominent. “This visit is for reasons other than your law-enforcement responsibilities, I take it.”

  “Riley, some devilish strange things are happening in my district.” Winkler’s jurisdiction encompassed the First through Sixth Wards of the city, stretching from City Hall south to Battery Park. He enjoyed close ties with Mayor Morris and therefore Tammany Hall, and was Steen’s primary source of information about the Society’s activities. Once Steen had occupied a position of considerable power in the Society, but certain events had led to an estrangement.

  “New York is a strange city, Ambrose,” Steen said. He sat behind his desk and motioned Winkler to the wingbacked chair in front of it. “Why don’t you tell me precisely what you mean?”

  “All right. Before last night, how long had it been since we had a thaw?”

  “Don’t pester me with circumlocution, Ambrose. What are you getting at?”

  “Almost three weeks,” Winkler continued. “A few days before Christmas it warmed right up and I could have sworn I saw buds on some of the trees along Broadway. I remember it because my children were worried there’d be no snow for Christmas. But it’s been cold since then.”

  “Yes. It has,” Steen said with exaggerated forbearance.

  “Right. Well, last night I was called to the scene of a murder on Front Streer. Chilled my very bones, Riley. Four men, all sailors on leave, lined up in a row with their heads crushed flat and the skin peeled from their bodies and hung on them like suits of clothes. Now right away I thought of you, Riley, and I kept it out of the penny sheets. But I can’t keep ignoring things like this. You and I go back a long time, and I saw some ungodly strange things during that business with Burr in Kentucky; but this is different. What do you know about it?”

  Steen wondered how much he could tell Winkler. He’d anticipated that the chacmool would be more active every twentieth day—that was in accordance with the old calendar, under which every twentieth day was sacred to Tlaloc. But the flaying ceremony was done to propitiate Xipe Totec, the Flayed One, a minor deity whose province seemed to be seeds. Perhaps, Steen thought, the various Aztec gods were simply different names assigned to a very few essential divinities. It was a thought he’d had before. Like Xiuhtecuhtli and the Old God Ometeotl, Tlaloc and Xipe Totec could very well be the same god once the nomenclature was properly dissected.

  “You’re holding out on me, Steen,” Winkler said angrily. “I’m not one to interfere in another man’s business, but you had damned well better tell me something so I can protect the people of this city.”

  “Please, Ambrose. Spare me the platitudes.” Steen rose. “If I told everything, it would be much more than you wanted to know. I will, however, tell you this: if you wish to protect your citizenry, you will find some pretext to keep them either locked in their houses or about in large groups twenty days from today.”

  He guided Winkler to the door. “On the twenty-eighth, very unusual things are likely to happen. It would be best if you remained unaware of them; failing that, avoid them.”

  “If something like this happens again—” Winkler began to protest.

  “I’ll talk to you in three weeks, Ambrose. Don’t press this.”

  The lieutenant started to leave, then stopped in the doorway.

  “One other thing, Riley. One of my sergeants mentioned seeing a young girl with a scarred face on Christmas, gawking at that business down on the docks.”

  Steen nodded and smiled slightly in spite of himself. Just as he’d thought, she was drawn to the chacmool’s activities.

  “What does she have to do with this?” Winkler still looked upset, but a conniving tone was beginning to creep into his voice.

  “Just pick her up if you can. Otherwise, three weeks. Happy New Year, Ambrose.” Steen shut the door.

  He stood in at his study window until Winkler crossed Hudson Street to his waiting carriage. There were plans to be made. If the chacmool kept its schedule, the twenty-eighth would be Steen’s next opportunity to capture it and set his plans back on track. But the twenty-eighth would fall under 2-Rabbit, the single most unlucky sign in the old calendar. Trying to get anything done on a day 2-Rabbit would be maddening at best, and possibly fatal if the Tochtli’s pranks turned mean-spirited. Perhaps it would be best to wait for a more auspicious signal from the heavens.

  Winkler was a bumbler. If he managed to collect the girl, which was unlikely, things would proceed more smoothly on that front, but the lieutenant would be constantly underfoot. It was an exchange Steen wasn’t sure he was willing to make, but plans had to be laid for every contingency. Plans were the root of success; history taught that. Improvisers made brief appearances on the pages of history, but careful planning was the stuff of which enduring value was made.

  Damn these clouds, Steen thought. The Mirror was blind on cloudy days, and today its vision would have been especially useful. But all things considered, the situation was far from hopeless. He knew when the chacmool would act next, and he had a strong intuition that Jane Prescott would not be far away when it did.

  Tozoztontli, 2-Rabbit—January 28, 1843

  It was Saturday night and Belinda’s Bright was filled to the rafters with workingmen drinking themselves into a collective stupor. The steamy heat of the saloon’s main room fogged the single window set to the right of the door, and Archie was sweating rivers as he took a short break from hauling kegs out of the storeroom. The Bright featured three-cent drinks, for which price a man could take a tube tapped into a keg and drink until his breath gave out. During busy times, the rubber tubes were passed from hand to hand like a drunk’s communion, and the kegs emptied nearly as fast as Archie could roll them out.

  Midnight had come and gone, but the banjo-and-fiddle combination still worked steadily through their six-song repertoire. Since nine o’clock, when they’d cleared a corner for themselves and begun playing, they had been through it six times, taking ample breaks to make the best of the free beer that was their only compensation. Fortified by their liquid salary, they showed no signs of tiring. Neither did Belinda’s patrons or the two whores who doubled as serving girls.

  Archie, on the other hand, was bone tired. He’d never been one for hard physical work—the typesetter’s job at the Herald had been just a means to an unaccomplished end—and Belinda kept him running, moving casks of beer and whiskey out from the back room and carting crates of iced oysters up from the Bright’s cellar. In return, he was allowed to sleep in that same cellar and help himself to the oysters and whatever else Belinda cooked in her “kitchen”—a small hearth behind the bar, hung with a kettle in which she kept a beef stew constantly simmering. Between the food and the work, Archie’s body was beginning to recover from its ordeal of the past month or so. He’d gained back some weight and even begun to add a fiber of muscle here and there in his shoulders and back. And his leg had made a nearly complete recovery, although it was inevitably stiff and sore when he got up from his straw bed in the basement chill.

  Belinda whistled piercingly from the front end of the bar, near the Bright’s entrance. Archie looked up and saw her waving a meaty arm at him as she took an empty glass from a square-jawed black Irishman, who looked carefully in both directions before scurrying out onto the street. She whistl
ed again, and Archie returned her wave, thinking that while her voice wouldn’t cut through the din, her whistle could raise the dead. He smiled to himself at the joke.

  “Need you to watch the back door the next hour,” Belinda shouted in his ear when he’d made his way to her. “My pet copper was in here saying some great fuss is being made at the ward station and patrols being put out all night. It’s a raid, is what I’m thinking, and I don’t intend to be open for the coppers to bust up my place and pour my liquor down their damned greedy grafting throats. We close early tonight.”

  “What am I watching for?” Archie asked.

  “The only folks I want using that back door are them two niggers,” Belinda said, cocking her head toward the musicians. “Bank on it: if a white man tries to leave through the back door, he’s either bringing the police or running from them. And if the coppers raid me, and some robber they’re lookin’ for makes good an escape into that alley, I might as well close up for good. I can’t have them thinking I harbor thieves and murderers here.”

  Belinda turned our toward the chaotic barroom and let loose a whistle that left Archie’s ears ringing. She waved at the musical duo, motioning them to wind up; the fiddler noticed and damped his partner’s strings with the flat of his hand.

  “Closing early tonight!” Belinda bellowed.

  A slurred chorus of dismay rose up, and a glass broke near the door. Belinda ignored it. “You’ve got half an hour to finish what’s on your tables and move along. You two,” she finished, pointing at the musicians, “one more tune to see everyone off.”

  She pushed Archie toward the door that gave out on the alley behind the Bright. “Go on, and remember what I told you.”

  In the half hour that followed, only the two Negroes passed Archie’s post at the alley door, nodding and sharing a bottle as they walked out into the chill night. The day had been warmer than usual, but the thaw was fading, and Archie sunk his chin into the knitted scarf Belinda had given him when he started. It had been lost by one of the girls’ patrons, as had all of the other clothing Archie was currently wearing; a regular wardrobe was piled on a pallet in one corner of the cellar.

  The stairs creaked over his head as either Kate or Lydia ushered a client up to the second-floor rooms. Archie wished he had a drink. He was adult enough to know the difference berween sex and love, but every time he heard that creak of foot on stair he nearly drowned in memories of Helen. How many times had he led her across the creaking floor of their bedroom on Orange Street, then laid her on the creaking bed and made delirious creaking love to her?

  Not nearly enough.

  Archie looked out into the main barroom, saw Belinda with her back to him, scattering handfuls of sawdust on the stinking floor. He went quickly into the back storeroom and brought out a quart of gin, taking a long juniper swallow as he reseated himself and kept watch for thieves and murderers. Bottle in hand, he forgot about Helen, drinking the memory away as Belinda shouted and stomped her booted feet, rousting senseless revelers.

  Archie leaned his head against the doorframe and let the gin take his mind where it would. A cool draft dried the sweat from his face, the last memory of the oddly springlike day. It would have been a good night for a long walk, if he’d had the energy, but he’d scarcely left the Bright in the three weeks he’d been there.

  A trickle of sweat itched his nose and Archie wiped it away, brushing the lump left by Royce’s sap. He hadn’t healed badly, considering the punishment he’d taken. Thanks to Wilson, he had food and a bed instead of slow decay in a muddy grave.

  “Presto,” Archie slurred against the doorframe. “Answer the madman’s question and this, too, can be yours.” He drank again and repeated, “Presto!” It sounded better when spoken a bit louder.

  Although Wilson had saved his life, the situation he offered Archie was like a mean-spirited joke at the expense of Archie’s former self. Archie had lost home and employment with a reputable firm, and now he sat drunk on gin, held up by the doorframe of a waterfront saloon he wouldn’t have set foot in two months ago.

  To his surprise, Archie found his normal resigned bitterness scoured away by a murderous bursting fury directed at Riley Steen and his Dead Rabbit henchmen. Emotion had been rare in the past weeks, when he’d simply been trying to come to terms with being alive, and now it was, well, intoxicating. He enjoyed the anger, reveled in its pure energy. Revenge gave him something to think about other than oysters and barrels of whiskey and the creak of warped floorboards under the feet of whores.

  Wilson had asked Archie, as they sat in the Brewery’s muddy noisome cellar, if he felt he’d gone insane as a result of his burial. “I certainly would have.” Wilson had shuddered before he continued. “Premature inhumation is without doubt the blackest, most horrible fate that can befall a man.”

  Archie had nodded without understanding; at that point his mind had been boiling with echoes of the deranged vision that was all he could remember of the previous three weeks. Wilson had listened raptly to Archie’s narrative of the dream, nodding now and again as if Archie’s recollection confirmed some long-held conviction.

  But dream wasn’t the right word, nor really. Archie had felt a constant sense in the vision that he was remembering the incredible events rather than creating or experiencing them. When he told Wilson that, the sad-eyed man had drawn in his breath sharply and looked for a moment as if he couldn’t decide whether to dance a jig or run screaming from the room.

  “Your soul left you, Archie,” Wilson had finally said, terrified wonder quavering in each word. “You must realize that. God! for a mesmerist to draw from you the rest of the tale.”

  Wilson had made good on his promise, taking Archie to Belinda’s Bright (“It used to say ‘Belinda’s Brighton Tavern’ but part of the sign was stolen one night,” Wilson explained) and presenting him to Belinda herself. The gray-headed matron had squinted warily at Archie’s emaciated frame, looking him up and down as if to assure herself that work wouldn’t kill him, but she had taken him in as if the entire arrangement had been made ahead of time.

  Archie harbored suspicions that Wilson had taken more than simply altruistic interest in his predicament, but he couldn’t fathom why. Once, about a week ago, Wilson had stopped at the Bright and asked Archie if he’d ever had a recurrence of the vision. Archie told him no, he hadn’t, and hoped he never would. Wilson had smiled, nodded, and dropped the subject.

  “That Wilson’s an odd character, isn’t he?” Archie had said to Belinda after Wilson had gone.

  “Who?”

  “Wilson, there. The man who brought me here.”

  “Archie, that beating must have addled your brains.” Belinda held a shot glass up to the light, set it on the counter, and filled it. “His name’s Edgar. Edgar Pope or something. An opium-smoking beggar, but folks tell me he’s something of a writer.”

  “Is that so,” Archie said. “I’ll have to ask him about that the next time he comes in.”

  But Wilson—or Pope, or whatever his name was—hadn’t been back since, and Archie, curious though he was about the man’s deception, was perfectly happy not to see him. If Wilson returned, Archie guessed, it would be to ask Archie again for a written account of his Brewery ordeal for the magazines, and Archie had no intention of providing such an account regardless of the incentive. He had poured too much of himself into the writing of other people’s misfortunes, and at last, it seemed, he had lost the taste for wallowing in his own.

  Thinking of dreams, Archie realized that he hadn’t been able to remember a single moment of dream since his arrival at Belinda’s. The details of that first vision, though, were still vividly alive in his memory: the city of stone pyramids, shadowed by cloud-wreathed green mountains; the fire, stinking of cooking flesh and roaring like the last breath of a dying soul; the huge fanged face carved from stone in a vast dark room, and the terrifying desperate hope that had come over him upon seeing it.

  The feathered token seemed to warm now,
radiating a soothing heat against his chest as he let the vision surround him. The small brass medallion had a symbol carved on it, what looked like a crescent moon inside a sun, and three long feathers were attached to a hole punched in the medallion by some sort of beaded string. He’d hung it around his neck on a leather thong, and he kept the knife on him at all times. They kept all of the experience real, somehow, and Archie had found that he couldn’t bear to be without either.

  He started, realizing that he’d dozed off. Anger and bitterness had both faded away; now he was just tired.

  Up front, Belinda was blowing out the last of the barroom lamps. “Go on to bed, Archie,” she called. “You can sleep late tomorrow.”

  That’s another thing I’ve lost, Archie thought as he stumbled down the narrow stair to his pile of straw in the cellar, the gin bottle sloshing in his hand. She decides when I go to bed, when I wake up, when I eat. I might as well be an infant again.

  He awoke the next morning with his mouth tasting like a cow’s hoof and the odor of gin seeping from his sweaty skin. “God,” Archie croaked, sitting up. The motion drove jagged slivers of glass behind his eyes, and he couldn’t focus on anything in the room. Objects swam drunkenly within their shapes, and the light was far too bright.

  He rubbed at his grainy eyes and someone shifted on the bed beside him. “Helen,” Archie murmured. “Can you get me a glass of water, love?”

  “Who?”

  Archie blinked and squinted; it wasn’t Helen in the bed, but Kate, the younger and darker of Belinda’s two serving girls. She was naked as a baby under the patched quilt. Helen was dead, and he was …

  Archie looked around, the sun streaming through the high narrow window immediately telling him that he wasn’t in his basement alcove. Jesus, he thought. I don’t remember any of this. Was I drunk? When? How did I get here?

  His mind stumbled, as if something kept falling between his questions and their answers like the sick pungency of the gin soaking out of his skin, masking his own smell. Something connected to the fierce pain that stabbed his eyes in the morning sunlight.